Tag: Pakistan

An extract from the documentary film “Drone” shows military recruiters scanning video game fairs for the next generation of drone operators for often-lethal military activities in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The top-ranking leader of the Taliban faction that claimed responsibility for last month’s mass slaughter of 153 people, many of them children, at the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, has taken to the Internet to warn that his group is prepared to strike again.

Three years into a sagging Clinton presidency and a bitterly divided Congress, the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long fought-over, much-delayed, heavily redacted report on the secret CIA drone wars was finally released. Committee chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) took to the Senate floor, and said…

Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai and Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi said they’ll use the award to try to bring their opposed countries together. And they’ll start by inviting their respective prime ministers to the award ceremony.

John Oliver’s been looking for information about the unmanned death robots, such as what exactly an “imminent threat means” or how many people are killed during any given drone strike. So far, “hard facts” have been hard to come by, and in the “Last Week Tonight” host’s words, it’s “completely fucking terrifying.”

By continuing contradictory policies in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in those countries and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting contributor Zubeida Mustafa, whose piece “How the Women of Pakistan Cope With War, Honor Killings and Prejudice” inaugurated the project in June, speaks about an advantage female journalists have over males and the necessity of humility in reporting.

On Monday, Truthdig launched a new initiative, Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, in conjunction with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), to support and promote the work of women journalists from around the world.

The five nuclear-legal countries—China, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S.—are deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have indicated the existence of programs that would, an authoritative study says.

In the wake of sexual assaults in the Global South, American conservatives and liberals alike naively ask the question of what is it about the “cultures” of countries such as Pakistan, India and Afghanistan that generates such misogyny.

Last week, Twitter made a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed inaccessible in Russia. In addition to blocking that account, Twitter has also worked with the Turkish government to monitor content that officials there find objectionable.

The increase of polio in Pakistan is being linked to a secret CIA effort to hunt Osama bin Laden, in which the agency set up fake vaccination clinics in the city of Abbottabad in order to get DNA from the bin Laden family. The Taliban subsequently banned immunization efforts and carried out deadly attacks on medical workers.

The World Health Organization warned Monday that polio has re-emerged as a public health emergency, after new cases of the crippling disease began surfacing and spreading across borders from countries such as Syria and Pakistan.

That Sean Hannity and other far right-wing pundits are supporting the regional militiamen and their mooching hero rather than the U.S. government gives you an idea what side they’d be on if they were in Pakistan.

If you were plotting to kill an American over coffee, you could end up in jail on a whole range of charges including—depending on the situation—terrorism. However, if the president’s doing the killing, it’s all nice and—let’s put those quote marks around it—“legal.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done an amazing job in targeting diseases for eradication, and the world is very close to getting rid of polio altogether, in part because the Gateses in recent years have given their support to the effort, which began in 1988.

The Pakistani Taliban have chosen a new permanent leader, Mullah Fazlullah, whose appointment suggests that the militant group isn’t interested in forging diplomatic ties with the Pakistani government anytime soon.

After Friday’s U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan killed Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, the militant network was left without a leader, but by Sunday, the position was filled for the time being.

One year ago, a 67-year-old Pakistani woman was killed allegedly in a U.S. drone attack while picking vegetables with her grandchildren. President Obama has never acknowledged her death or that of any other alleged drone victim in Pakistan. This week, her son and two of her grandchildren traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before members of Congress.

On Tuesday, a Pakistani family will tell members of Congress about the aerial attack they survived but their grandmother did not in the first meeting between legislators and the victims of an alleged U.S. drone strike.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in separate reports, accused the U.S. of committing likely war crimes through the drone killings of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. Both also called for full investigations and more transparency from the U.S. on whom it kills, where and why—and to open itself to criminal investigations when those attacks violated international law.

Remember Malala Yousafzai, the valiant girl who was attacked by terrorists in Pakistan last year for her education campaigns? Well, apparently, the Pakistani Taliban are quite relentless and have renewed their threats to kill her.

Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower. The list of defiant figures—from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians—is lengthening.

The U.S. all but shut down its diplomatic office in Lahore, Pakistan, ordering nonessential staff to move to the capital Islamabad while citing a specific threat amid soaring terrorist violence in the country.

A Bureau of Investigative Journalism report published Thursday “appears to confirm” that the Central Intelligence Agency targeted rescuers at sites of previous drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan last year.

Retired Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former second-ranking officer in the U.S. military and influential adviser to President Obama on security matters, is the focus of an investigation into a leak of classified information about American cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program.